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Attempting to loosen the purse strings while hammering home a message of fiscal rectitude won’t be easy. But in the back of Hammond’s mind will be a visit he made a few years ago to the Kinloss army barracks in Scotland.

Staff there know a thing or two about saving money. When Kinloss was still an RAF base, the department for Defence – led by Hammond – embarked on a wave of cuts that would see the department shrink by a fifth between 2010 and 2015.

Hammond, who has managed the budgets of two big departments – defence and transport – knows how Whitehall cuts work. The Treasury...